Ed's Stratego Site - The Stratego Message Board

January, 2024

It is so interesting how timing works out sometimes.

I played a lot of Stratego in high school and I have kept a Stratego game in my inventory over the years. In December I introduced my 6-year-old daughter to Stratego for the first time and she enjoyed it for the most part. (She's a sore loser, but we're working on that.)

Being an amateur developer, I decided to build my own browser-based Stratego game so I could build in some helper features to help her learn the game. Things like tagging pieces that have been revealed and highlighting pieces when they move for example, or revealing ALL piece ranks from the beginning.

I spent about a week putting it together and we've been playing a lot since then. I haven't built in the ability to create your own layouts yet, but I have a number of templates built in that randomly adjust themselves between a few alternate placements and a mirror version of each one to prevent too easily memorizing them all. I do plan on adding a piece placement feature in the future, but that'll take some time to get right.

While looking for templates, I spent hours combing the internet for examples and I found a handful. I found hundreds of links to dead sites however. I did not find your site back in December, but I did find it tonight. Evidently, from your post on January 27, that's because you were offline in December. Now that you're back online, your page of templates was a nice find. (Although it was only through a link on an old forum archive from page 3 of Google results that I found your site.) I plan to add several of the templates you have listed to my version when I can find some time to do so.

I see that a few others have put Stratego clones online to play or have built stand-alone games as well as at least one retail game out there with ranked matches. I really like the helper features that I put in mine for my daughter to learn with though as well as the fact that mine can be played in any web browser. I don't know what risk I take of being found by the trademark holders, but reading your site made me think that may not be a big risk, at least not at the moment. If it does become a problem, it seems like I could just rename it to CTF or something.

I do use the "10 is strongest" numbering scheme, even though I first played the traditional way. I don't care either way personally, but when teaching new players it is a lot easier for them to pick it up when the higher number is the higher strength. It just allows them to focus on the strategy of it and not the logistics of the numbers as it is just intuitive for higher numbers to be stronger for most people (even if it is only ever so slightly less intuitive the traditional way, it always tends to trip up new players for more than a few games). I see you feel very strongly about the Marshal being a 1, but hopefully we can still be friends. For what it's worth, I think the change was made to the retail games for the adults, not the kids. Kids are so malleable that they pick up on things like that in an instant. Their parents or grandparents however, are more likely to play with them if they can understand something without having to learn anything new.

If you care to check my version out, you can find it here: https://wilsonit.net/projects/stratego

My version is not super flashy, as I am an IT guy and not a graphic designer, but it works. Feel free to list it on your links page if you feel it's worthy of sharing. I'm open to feedback as well.

On the scout movement confusion, I found the same thing you explain on your site, where some rule books added the provision against scouts moving and striking in one turn, but I also found others where the language is just ambiguous. My personal set is ambiguous in that in one section it states that you can "move OR attack" in each turn, and then in the special scout movement section it only states that the scout can move in a straight line if the spaces are open. It does not clearly state if the scout can move and attack in one turn, but seems to hint that it cannot with the "OR" stipulation in the other section. All of this is sort of moot though, in that to me, if the scout cannot attack during a move, then it's multi-square movement ability is basically worthless. In Stratego, a huge part of the strategy is choosing when to reveal and when to not reveal rank. If you move a scout more than one square, you immediately reveal its rank so it is immediately a target by every piece except a spy. If it cannot also attack, there are very few scenarios where this would ever be useful because the defender could choose which piece to attack it with to preserve the identity of pieces they wanted to keep hidden. As the weakest piece (aside from the spy) its core value is probing and being a pawn sacrifice to gain knowledge. Without the ability to sneak attack from across the board, that value isn't there. Therefore, the "correct" rule must be that the scout can move AND attack in my mind, and any other interpretations come from someone altering the rules mistakenly without a full understanding of what they were writing.

To me, whether the scout can attack in a different direction than they move is a more interesting question that has been raised because THAT question is not clear in any rule book that I know of. For me though, we again go back to the bigger picture and consider the rest of the play strategy in the game. If a scout can move 4 spaces forward, and then attack one square to the side, that negates much of the benefit of the lakes / no-mans-land. You certainly cannot hide a Marshal from discovery by a scout any longer if the scout can turn a corner so that is out for me.

I'm glad I found your site, keep Stratego alive!

Shawn Wilson